Maureen’s Book Club Picks

Maureen’s Picks

Maureen Smith has led groups for over ten years in the Chicago area and completed her graduate work at Ohio State University focusing on the tensions between the spoken and written word in African-American women’s fiction. As of now, she consults 8 book groups. Below are some of her groups’ favorite reads across multiple genres.

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Featured Titles

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

An exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family.

During the Nazis’ siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested and thrown into the same cell as a deserter named Kolya. They are given a shot at saving their own lives by embarking on a hunt through the dire lawlessness of Leningrad and behind enemy lines to find the impossible.

Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, she is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life.

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life.

In the 1920s, a man named Lloyd Wilson was killed on a farm in rural Illinois, ending a friendship between two lonely teenagers. Fifty years later, one man tries to reconstruct the events that led to the murder, and is drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, the son of Wilson’s killer.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and he is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel near the Kremlin. Rostov must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors.

Edgar survives not just a bizarre accident, but a hellish boarding school for Native American orphans, a well-meaning but dysfunctional Mormon foster-family, and the loss of the illusions that are supposed to make life bearable while still retaining his innate goodness.

Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, this is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.

Weaving together seemingly disparate lives in the 1970’s, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of New York City’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.”

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellows, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.

Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August. For them, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were a part of a future that belonged to them. But there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where madness was just a sunset away.

In 1936, a young mother resting by the side of the road in central California is photographed by a woman documenting migrant laborers, producing one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression. Silver creates an extraordinary tale from a brief event in history and its repercussions.

Following crashed airman Louis Zamperini as he braves the ocean in a life raft, Unbroken is an unforgettable testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit, brought vividly to life by Hillenbrand.

An innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

A Hope in the Unseen chronicles Cedric’s odyssey during his last two years of high school, follows him through his difficult first year at Brown, and now tells the story of his subsequent successes in college and the world of work.

In this brilliant, essential book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas L. Friedman speaks to America’s urgent need for national renewal and explains how a green revolution can bring about both a sustainable environment and a sustainable America.

Out of a handful of unlikely-really unlikely-heroes, Lewis fashions a story as compelling and unusual as any of his earlier bestsellers, proving yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our time.

Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln’s political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president.

In this brilliant, breathtaking book, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport.

Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.

This phenomenal New York Times bestseller tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew.

These eight stories take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand, as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life. Here they enter the worlds of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers.

Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality.

Each story in the collection starts in the comic mode, with heroes who suffer willful self-deceit. From self-deception, these not-so-innocents proceed to deceive others, who don’t take it lightly. Revenge is the consequence.

In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. She reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose.

Through fiction of dazzling skill and astonishing emotional force, Fallon welcomes readers into the American army base at Fort Hood, Texas, where U.S. soldiers prepare to fight, and where their families are left to cope.